Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

the beginning and the end: and that truth, knowledge, and insight werecomprehended in its expansion. This was the true and first apostasy—whenin council and synod the divine humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculativesystems, and religion became a science of shadows under the nameof theology, or at least a bare skeleton of truth, without life, or interest, alikeinaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians.” 8Through Coleridge’s acknowledgment of the crucial validity of thefeeling life, Marsh experienced that the will’s wellspring of faith could berejuvenated, that reason could be illuminated with the greater vitality ofhigher reason, a faculty limited not to the mere mind of man, but capableof shining with the light of the creator. Hence one’s language, rather thanbeing a collection of stickers stuck on the things of the world, could in factbear the things of the world with such an artful care that they revealed infact the spirit of their creator. The language of theology could in fact livinglyreflect the living spirit.James Marsh became a Congregationalist minister, and the wisetrustees of the University of Vermont invited him in 1826 to become presidentof their university. As president and professor, he devoted the rest ofthis life to establishing a college curriculum based on a Coleridgean foundation.Partially through Marsh’s interests and efforts to heal the rifts betweenAmerica’s Calvinists and Unitarians, Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection became,as Perry Miller said, the “book which was of the greatest single importancein the forming of the Transcendentalists’ minds.” 9A generation younger than James Marsh, Horace Bushnell was acountry boy who had carded wool with his father. When he arrived at Yale,he realized that he had no language with which to express his religiousexperiences. Reading Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, Bushnell found that“writing became, to a considerable extent, the making of a language, andnot going to dictionaries.” He became aware of how, “the second, third, thethirteenth sense of words, all but the first physical first sense belong to theempyrean, and are given, as we see in the prophets, to be inspired by.” 10 Asearly as 1839, he published his Preliminary Dissertation on Language. Duringthe ensuing decade he continuously strove to develop language shimmeringwith inspiration, like that of the prophets, language enspirited, enthused,vibrant with multidimensionality beyond the limitations of logic, in short,language that was like life.Bushnell’s collection of sermons, God in Christ, published in 1849,articulates “a Logoism in the forms of things, [so that things] serve astypes of images of what is inmost in our souls [because] God, the universalAuthor, stands EXPRESSED everywhere.” 11 Bushnell experienced that rather155